Trump delays proposed Putin meeting until 2019
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration sought to fend off accusations the president is too soft on Russia on Wednesday, putting off a proposed second summit with Russian leader Vladimir Putin and declaring the U.S. will never recognize Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea.
As members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee peppered Secretary of State Mike Pompeo with questions about last week’s summit in Finland, the White House said President Donald Trump had opted against trying to meet with Putin this fall. Putin already had sent signals that the White House meeting wasn’t going to happen.
National security adviser John Bolton cited special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election as the reason for the delay, although many members of Congress had objected to the meeting and said Putin would not be welcome on Capitol Hill.
“The President believes that the next bilateral meeting with President Putin should take place after the Russia witch hunt is over, so we’ve agreed that it will be after the first of the year,” Bolton said in a statement, using Trump’s favored but highly controversial term for the Mueller probe.
While the statement signaled optimism that the Mueller probe would be completed by the end of this year, no timetable has been given for when it will be wrapped up and it could very well stretch into 2019.
The White House said last week that Trump had directed Bolton to invite Putin to visit Washington in the fall, moving quickly for a follow-up meeting amid the backlash over Trump’s performance at a news conference with Putin following their Helsinki summit.
In his testimony, Pompeo faced often-contentious questioning from senators demanding information about what Trump discussed with Putin while they were alone for nearly two hours with only translators present.
Pompeo struggled to fend off those questions, insisting the president is entitled to have private meetings but stressing that he had a full understanding of the discussion. Heated questions were also posed about North Korea, NATO and Iran.
“It’s not for me to disclose the content of those conversations,” Pompeo said in response to one such barrage of questions.
The committee chairman, Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., set a contentious tone for the hearing.
“You come before a group of senators today who are filled with serious doubts about this White House and its conduct of American foreign policy,” Corker told Pompeo at the start. He added later: “From where we sit it seems that the White House is waking up every morning and making it up as we go.”
The ranking member, Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., was no less harsh, accusing the administration of holding “incoherent and contradictory views” on foreign policy and the president himself of being “misleading and untruthful” in describing his positions.
In a bid to stave off some of the hostile questioning, particularly on Russia, Pompeo before the hearing issued a statement titled the “Crimea Declaration” in which he said the U.S. will continue to insist that Ukraine’s territorial integrity be restored. He said the U.S. would hold to its long-standing principle of refusing to recognize Kremlin claims of sovereignty over territory seized by force in violation of international law. And he called for Russia to respect principles it claims to respect and “end its occupation of Crimea.”